2012 Heysen Sculpture Biennial B6

26 February - 9 April 2012

The 2012 Heysen Sculpture Biennial was opened by Nick Mitzevich, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. John Neylon wrote the Catalogue essay.

Nick Mitzevich, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, opening the 2012 Heysen Sculpture Biennial. Also pictured, Allan Campbell, Curator of The Cedars and HSB committee member, and Pamela Kouwenhoven, artist and HSB committee member.

Heysen Sculpture Biennial Committee:

Curator: Allan Campbell

Coordinator: Alison Brown

Artists: Penny Choate, Pamela Kouwenhoven, Max Lyle, Ron Rowe

Friday, 2 March 2012 - Dr Tamsin Kerr, Director of the Cooroora Institute, Queensland will write and speak about the Homage to Nature exhibition, its place in Australian environmental art and the works of the artists taking part. 'Collaborating with country and sculpting our future: site-specific artworks as creative policy' is the title of her presentation.

Dr Tamsin Kerr's article on the 2012 Heysen Sculpture Biennial B6 is in the Art Monthly magazine, August 2012.

Photos by Daniel Cazzolato 2012 unless noted otherwise.

Catalogue essay by John Neylon, an Adelaide-based curator and art writer for The Adelaide Review.

Craige ANDRAE

Giraffe

Silvio APPONYI

Growing

I have been working on some marble vertical themed pieces in the last couple of years. This is the first of the polished granite works, portraits of grass. The most common subject seen by man. On which our farming economy relies.

Fishing for Waste

Jan CLIFFORD

Reclamation

I was interested in the challenge of developing random weave forms from discarded prunings from my garden which are also replicated in The Cedars garden. These impermanent forms will remain for a time but will eventually return to the earth from whence they came.

Helen CRAWFORD

Below the Surface

Human interconnection with nature is tempered. We live with a facade of stability and control over our life, and our place in the world. We are energy, operating above and below our conscious abilities.

Leith ELDER

Asphodelus

Onion weed. An ornamental plant imported from Europe that has become a pest species in Australia, thriving in disturbed and impoverished soils. Ideas and cultures, like plants, can thrive in unexpected places.

India FLINT

Landmark

Humans have been creating signs upon the Earth for thousands of years; as waymarks, indicators of possession or in order to give emphasis to sites of importance. The circle drawn from earth, stones and cloth dyed with windfallen leaves declares this piece of land significant for a time.

Ian HAMILTON & John HAYWARD

Bower Tower Project: Large Marquette #1

Ian Hamilton and John Hayward established the Bower Tower Project in 2010. The project, initially inspired by the structures of the male Golden Bowerbird (Prionodura newtoniana) is a continuing investigation of art making and structure building

Anton HART

Landing

Landing was originally made in 1996 and inspired by Eileen Gray's famous 1920s house E. 1027. Resetting this piece in 2011 overlooking Heysen's studio reflects on ideas of looking and framing, the landscape and history.

Margie HOOPER

Mirror of perfection, St Francis

Greg JOHNS

Shedding Figure

Shedding Figure is from the series I began around nineteen-ninety. My aim has been to develop a sense of figuration which comes out of a 'reading' of the Australian landscape. These protection figures also reach out to universal themes.

David KERR

Turkeys and Saplings

This is an abstraction of Heysen's Bronzewings and Saplings painting. Heysen wrote in 1921 that this painting was the most complicated piece of design he had tackled. My assemblage forages in this painting within the three dimensional space of Heysen's saplings.

Assemblage of plastic chairs, sapling environs. Located in a 10m x 10m section of saplings. POA

Max LYLE

Four Freedoms 2

The four sculptural forms refer to the definitions of the 'Four Freedoms' of democracy as stated by US President Roosevelt in the 1940s Freedom of Speech, Freedom of choice of Religion, Freedom from Poverty, Freedom from Fear. All have relevance to our present day world where these basic freedoms are constantly being challenged and compromised.

James MARTIN (1944-2011)

Régates

The enlarged features and form of the five elements that make up the Régates series illustrate James' ongoing fascination with, and inquiry into, the limitless ways in which it is possible to represent the human face and form.

Rick MARTIN

Pferde Stuhl (Horse Chair)

Early Colonial Horse Chair - thought to have been brought to Australia c. 1840 by German Whalers. This is an experiment in horse chairs which culminated in the horse divan, an example of which can be found in the collection of the Cameroon Museum of Decorative Arts.

Tis MILNER-NICHOLS

Nostalgic Lens

Life is no picnic, or is it?

It is all too easy to romanticize bygone eras as simpler times or we could smugly vilify ignorance of early settlers and the unwitting destruction of delicate eco systems. Hindsight distorts the lens of perception.

Focusing on form, colour and texture Tis Milner-Nichols selects materials for their inherent qualities. The resultant sculptural language develops a narrative to explore the gap between encounter and identification.

Andrea NUM GLOVER

Phone the crows La Nina Fibonnacci

Phone the crows La Nina Fibonnacci is a playful piece Re/calling/cording past sequences: Methods of sensory communication, of visual appropriation, of cinema, of naming weather patterns and the fabrication of identity. El Nino, a South American man had many abusive calls ­blaming him for the weather pattern!

Sophia PHILLIPS

Lost or Found

These objects started to appear in my fist as I prepared clay to Make Something. And they accumulated. My procrastinations, simple fascinations. The urge to collect and conquer the ineffable. Make meaning without meaning to.

Will POWRIE

Feathertop

Through vernacular materials, this work pays homage to native grass species, in particular the prickly and highly adaptive desert Spinifex, or Triodia genus. Spinifex is both destroyed and regenerated by fire.

Out of the Water - version 2

Deb SLEEMAN

Regrowth

I search for gaps in which to create a dialogue between the intangible connections of people and the natural world, continuing to explore the perceived animate and inanimate as integral rather than separate entity.

Imagining the future through fragments of the past and the deep resonance of the elements are the fuel for this work.

Peter SYNDICAS

The Shady Pool

Peter's sculptures explore a fascination with organic shapes in their simplest forms - fractals of nature. Twigs - fragile, precious, shaped by the elements. Delicately carved, the revealed forms are translated in a magnified scale and immortalized in bronze.

Evette SUNSET

1000 Stooks of Gratitude

The Idea - the work is a space both created and experienced by all those who came to pause within it, taking pleasure and meaning from their time here together with each other, the land, its creatures and weathers: we bend to the earth and as the trembling grasses pass through our hands listen, just listen

Mementos - DVD documentary and photographic cards will be on sale at The Cedars shop.

Wild Yorkshire Fog grass tied in situ by visitors and left to dry. 400cm diameter

Marijana TADIC

The Bounty of Light

Hans Heysen, who arrived in Adelaide from Germany in 1884, recalled, 'My first impression upon arrival was that of expanse, of simplicity and beauty of contours - the light, flat and all objects sharply defined.'

Certainly for me who also traveled to Australia, the singularity, the clear intensity of the light, never fails to astonish. The Bounty of Light is a reference to the amazing richness of Australian light - the quality that inspires and sets the Australian landscape apart.

Mal WASS

Three in Stasis

Where does the landscape finish?
At the horizon? - At your feet? - At your front door?
Through simple existence we create a 'lived' relationship with the landscape and its inherent materiality, a relationship built from a collective history of interactions and interventions upon the spaces we inhabit.
Taking influence from the traditional Japanese aesthetic the 'materiality' and interventions combined in Three in Stasis is in response to the evolving interrelationships we have with our surrounds. These relationships I believe are more than personal responses, they are part of us.

Sally WICKES

Watcher

The white rabbit emerging from the ground carries layers of allegorical meaning. In essence it represents the role of earthly and ecological stewardship, and the responsibility for wise and timely choices.

Liz WILLIAMS

Roberta

The work was made specifically for this environment. My intention is that it should convey something of the universality of being a child. Being placed in the garden becomes a metaphor for cycles and seasons, past and present.

John WOOD

The Secret Life of Trees

The Sculpture refers to the layers of experience held within every tree. The memories of seasons, drought, rain, winter and summer, held for many years and seldom revealed. Memories of time crystallized in an internal structure.

Margaret WORTH

Comings and Goings: sanctuary

A response to the natural site and to the context of Heysen's home and studio, reflecting on life, art and reputations. They all come and go.
An anthill and rotting wood are given sanctuary, temporarily.

Since 2009, just before the huge dust storm that crossed eastern Australia, I have been interested in working with dusts. I have found it a broad ranging material from the kitchen to the cosmos, with a wealth of scientific studies on how it has affected the composition of the world and how our lives are affected. Everything begins to look different in the light of knowing it's origins in dust.

The idea of sanctuary is central to the existence of The Cedars and seemed fitting also for this industrious ant hill, perched on a fallen one of Heysen's beloved gum trees.